Hello.  I am just trying to find out if it is possible to get, buy, find or make my own tye-dye letters and numbers to put on t-shirts.  My daughter is on a basketball high school team, and for senior night, we parents want to wear shirts, with the team name on the front, but surprise them with their nick names and team numbers in their favorite colors.  Two of the girls favorite colors are tye-dye.  I have not been able to find any shirt place that can get tye-dye letters and numbers to iron on or heat press.  This event is in mid Feb, and any help would be wonderful!
Thanks!!!!!

The heat-transfer problem is easily solved. What you do is buy inkjet iron-on transfer paper. Then you find or scan in a tie-dye pattern, print it onto the transfers, and cut the letters out of it. Use a t-shirt press or a home iron to transfer them onto the shirts.

If the shirts you will be ironing them onto are anything other than white, then you will have to buy opaque t-shirt transfers, so that the lighter colors will show up. Look for the word "dark" on the label. An office supply company may carry these; some brands are Personal Creations Dark T-Shirt Transfer, the Office Depot brand of the same thing, and HP's Iron-On Transfers for Color Fabrics. Joann's Fabrics sells June Tailor brand Dark T-shirt Transfer. Dharma Trading Company also carries inkjet transfers for both white and dark clothing.

Even if you include the letters in your design when you are printing it out, you will need to cut out the background in order to get a good result. Be sure to prewash your shirts before applying the iron-ons.

Iron-on transfers for dark fabric should be printed the right way around, if you are including letters in the design you print out. This is in contrast to ordinary iron-on transfers for white fabric, which must be printed backwards in order to come out right when printed.

Where will you find an appropriate background to use for printing your transfers? If you have a tie-dyed t-shirt handy, you can place it directly on your computer's scanner and scan in a pageful of it, or you can take a picture with your camera in close-up mode, preferably in bright light (the camera flash alone will not give as good results). If that is impossible, you can find an image by doing a web search for tie-dye wallpaper, designed for use as backgrounds on computers, for example this picture to the right from Tie Dye Temple.

An alternative approach is to buy pre-cut letter or number appliqués that are made of a synthetic-fiber fabric, such as polyester or nylon (cotton and rayon will not do). You can then color a tie-dye design onto some paper, using special fabric crayons that are made for this purpose, and iron the design onto your letters and numbers. Do not attempt to do this with ordinary wax crayons! Fabric crayons look and feel just like wax crayons, but they contain a completely different material. Here's a page showing an example of their use: "Iron-on Fabric Crayons for Synthetic Fibers". You can buy fabric crayons in your local fabric store, or in many cases from a store such as Target or Walmart. Look for "Crayola Fabric Crayons" or "Transfer Fabric Crayons" or "Dritz Iron Transfer Crayons". Here are pictures showing the different packages I've seen these same crayons being sold in:

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